Avoid Hurting Your Brand With These Social Media Mistakes

Social media has great potential for businesses looking to increase their reach, traffic and leads. As the public face of your company online, using social media inappropriately can quickly lead to customer alienation and damage your brands reputation. To make sure that you’re getting the most out of social media, make sure to avoid the following mistakes.

Not properly vetting and supervising your social media managers

Your social media managers are the face of your company online. With social media now driving almost a third of all referral traffic, it’s absolutely critical that those responsible for driving these referrals are up to the task. Giving inexperienced, untrained or poorly supervised employees free reign of the company’s social media accounts can seriously damage a brands image and reputation.

Posting the same type of content over, and over, and over…

Posting the same types of content again and again can convey the impression that your brand is boring, uncreative or just not in tune with your audience. Instead of posting photo after photo, link after link or quote after quote, change things up by posting a wide variety of content. Think of your presence on Facebook like a performance: you are there to enlighten and entertain, not just sell! Showcase your staff, post about quirky and funny things that happens at your workplace, or funny news in your industry.

Using poor quality images

As social media is such a highly visual medium, one of the worst things a business can do which will look unprofessional and sloppy, is have poor quality images. No one wants to see a dimly lit photo of dress you are selling slumped over a chair, or a group photo of your staff that looks like you just lifted it off your Snapchat after a drunken night out. That’s not how you sell your products or show your brand in a professional manner. You want to show yourself or your wares in their best light.

We all know that lower resolution images are advised for websites, but if you want truly outstanding images on your social media accounts, I suggest 300dpi. Make sure all your images are well lit, and showcase your brand in the best possible way. Logos or text images should be uploaded as PNG and not JPEG to avoid blurriness.

Getting too personal

Sharing your brand’s personality is essential; it can help you stand out from other brands and gives followers an idea of the people behind the business. However, you don’t want to get too personal with your social media profiles. Engaging in negative feedback or sharing sensitive topics like politics or religion, can harm you brand’s reputation and turn off your followers.

Spamming your followers

Sharing content or statuses on a frequent basis is an absolute must, but you don’t want to overdo it. Eventually, followers will get tired of you flooding their social media accounts – especially if you are uploading everything at once whenever you have spare time, instead of scheduling posts.

Don’t post just for the sake of posting

If you don’t have anything to say then don’t force it. Nobody wants to see a post from a brand that reads “Ugh, stuck in traffic to the office” because quite frankly, it’s not the most revolutionary sentiment and likely has very little to do with your brand.

Spend some time at the start of each month to go through your calendar of events, identify your marketing and social media goals, and have a baseline calendar of what you want to share through social media in any given week. This will give you a sense of evergreen content while still leaving you flexibility for unplanned events that make for great in-the-moment posts.

Ignoring or responding badly to negative comments

Negative feedback is going to happen at some stage. You can choose to ignore it, fight back or take it in stride. How you respond says a lot about your brand. Some brands operate under the assumption that they can simply delete negative comments without repercussions. Others believe that ignoring negative or inflammatory comments is the way to go.

Rather than avoiding the situation, why not use these situations as opportunities to shine? Respond thoughtfully and promptly to negative comments, and use them as opportunities to showcase your commitment to customer service.

Not checking your analytics

Even if you’re not required to provide social media reports to a supervisor, it’s a good idea to track results to identify patterns and know your audience. By reviewing these results on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis, you will be able to tell not only what content is and isn’t working, but gain valuable insights about who is interacting with your posts.

In Conclusion:

Social media is one of the best ways to spread brand awareness and engage with your audience. However, it can also be detrimental if you treat your brand’s account like that of a uni student. Always be professional and avoid scenarios that include anything that is sensitive to your customers. Avoiding these mistakes all comes down to ensuring your team is properly trained, using your resources wisely and responding to your fans and followers in a professional manner.